The Point of the iPad

It’s a common cycle: new application of technology is envisioned, wished for, described in infinite (and contradictory) detail, and, at long last, rumored to be on its way to the marketplace. That’s when the fun really sets in. Hell hath no fury like a geek scorned.

We saw it with the original iPod–I still remember reading the article on nerd bastion Slashdot.org that declared the concept completely DOA. It happened with Xbox (“Micro$oft making a racing game? When you crash the car, it crashes your console! Snort!”). It happened with the Nintendo DS (“Two screens? I guess we can have twice as much of the same Mario game they’ve been remaking for 20 years, amirite?”). One can only imagine the backlash around 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (“What possible practical application could this have? Now the world can see pictures of my cat!”).

That scorn takes on extra fury when the perception is that the company just isn’t thinking. How could they be so foolish? Why, their whole company could have been saved from inevitable failure if they had just heeded the wisdom of Complaining Geek #256, Who Definitely Is Never Going to Buy This Broken Failure of a Product Now That They’ve Shown They Have No Clue.

Here’s the psychology of it: you envision, in your head, a detailed concept for exactly what sort of product would precisely solve your particular set of problems. In the case of the iPad, it would have all the processing power of a MacBook Pro, would run OSX, would have a video camera, would have facial recognition, etc. etc. This probably solves the problem of the average Mac laptop user, who might want a smaller, lighter, fundamentally cooler version of the same thing.

But clearly, this is not the problem for which the iPad was designed. And so, because it doesn’t solve my problem, it is broken, and Apple missed the boat, the fools.

Now, let’s think this through from Apple’s perspective. If you already have a Macbook, and are invested in the platform, and are likely to buy another one in three years’ time when yours has become obsolete, what possible reason would Apple have to invent a device that replaces a Macbook–a laptop that makes a very nice profit for Apple, a thing which is certainly not broken, and has no need of being fixed? They already have your future dollar. The goal is to capture dollars which are not already spoken for.

Think of Nintendo with their Wii (another great example of nerd outcry). Some business-speak for you: if there is a defined market of people who will use a certain class of product, and you want a piece of that market, and you believe that most everybody who is going to be in that market is already in it, the only way to gain a share of that market is to compete with everybody else in the space. For Nintendo, they looked at a crowded 3-player market of core console video games and saw that the endgame was a bloody battle of attrition to grab players from Xbox and Playstation, or get people to purchase more than one platform.

But there is another way: create a new market.

As Jobs said in his keynote, the iPhone has an established niche. So does the Macbook. The idea is to determine whether or not there is room for something in-between. Like Nintendo, who gambled that there were lots and lots of people out there who might be interested in playing a different sort of video game, Apple is gambling that there are lots and lots of people out there who might be interested in a new “class” of device.

A very easy-to-use computer, more similar to a cell phone than a complex, scary laptop, with all its software to be installed and viruses and whatever an operating system is.

A computer with the ability to have wireless internet anywhere, not just within range of a wifi hotspot.

A computer which is built around the needs not of a computer programmer, who wants complete control over the machine, who uses it like a block of clay to sculpt more and more complex works of art. A computer that operates quite a bit like the old concept of the Internet Appliance: a device whose sole purpose is to surf the web.

3Com tried it with their Audrey. So did Compaq, with their iPAQ. Hey, there were plenty of other MP3 players before the iPod came on the market.

The iPad is the coming of age of the Internet Appliance. The ease-of-use of a microwave oven, applications that install as if from the dollar menu at McDonalds and just work, and the always-on network connectivity of a cell phone. It’s not a computer. It’s the embodiment of Web 3.0. It’s the Internet, everywhere.

Let me repeat that: the whole sum of human knowledge, accessible anywhere, for about the same price as you pay to get web access on your tiny little phone. Cheap, ubiquitous wireless access just took on a more useful form factor. That’s the revolution here, and it’s going to change things, big-time.

The users are an untapped market. They are your grandmother who winters in Florida and doesn’t want to pay for an internet connection that will go unused half of the year. They are the guy who cuts your hair and wants to keep in touch with his kids in California, but doesn’t know the first thing about computers. They are your classmates who play games on consoles and just need a simple PC for taking notes, or reading textbooks which they bought online at a discount. They are road warrior consultants who need Word, Excel, Powerpoint, email and a web browser, in the most lightweight and portable package possible. They are all the people who use the basic functionality in every application, panic at fake virus popup windows, and wonder why on earth this Internet thing can’t be less complicated.

They are not you.

Remember: you may think that it’s ridiculous to own more than a half-dozen pairs of shoes. That hasn’t stopped Zappos.com from making millions. In other words, it’s not always about you.

So, you can buy a full-featured netbook for less than the price of an iPad, install Linux on it, author shareware or hack kernels or even install OSX on it and thumb your nose at Cupertino. Have fun. Apple will be perfectly happy to allow Asus and the rest to compete over a few dollars of margin in the cutthroat netbook market.

In the meantime, they’ll be busy cornering a new market. And that’s why they make the big bucks.